


Old Solution

by venus woman and giant saurian (grayglube)



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Amaru - Freeform, Canon Divergent, F/M, Mind Manipulation, Mindfuck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:47:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23307793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/venus%20woman%20and%20giant%20saurian
Summary: He’s back in a room sharing blood and bond with a girl who’s too young for him, too good and not wise enough to life to do her any good.“Do not forget the helpless. Break the arm of the wicked and evildoer."The sharing that happens sometimes is indelible, always on him or in him. Revelatory.
Relationships: Kate Fuller/Richard Gecko
Comments: 5
Kudos: 32





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This has been rattling around in my mind for a while, there are hints if you're looking close enough, takes place roughly in episodes 1-3 for this part. Nothing to really make it live up to the rating just yet, but we'll get there.

_Psalms, Revelations_

The first few hours on her own after being cast out, then cast away, are a jarring mesh of the night-time desert hum, the static of the busted radio, the grind of road gravel and most of all their final conversation on repeat. For her, though, it’s not final, and she's still fully convinced she’ll cross paths with Seth Gecko again and she’ll be proven right and most of all _righteous_.

For him, however, he _is_ right. Though she doesn't know it just then, it is the final time they’ll exchange words, ones that are far more than the usual _civil_ and _aware,_ the touchstone of their honestly that's based solely on his inebriation and her charity, but never her chastity as later becomes the brief and caustic, bitter remark upon their time together by the one who was decidedly _not_ a part of it.

It's less complicated than it seems, at first glance.

The black space of the car's interior is filled with the bulbous grind of the seat cover into her shoulder blades and lower back, the scent of blood and marijuana, sweet medicinal _otherness_ derived from the pharmaceutical speed used to satiate the edge of the only other person who's driven in it the last week.

It’s bitter knowing it’s the end but she doesn’t know it’s the end, only knows what she’s meant to do, filled with divine right as she is, ‘to the brim’ one of a pair of them will think later, when what’s done is done.

But nothing’s done yet.

She’s not done.

There’s still something left worth saving, a brother not worth giving up on and not even Seth Gecko who half thought to leave her alone on the road behind him like so many other casualties that marked the distance between him and a score, between him and his other half, can convince her otherwise.

When and where exactly she became Seth Gecko, Kate Fuller doesn’t quite know, she just knows that there’s something to be done that only she can do and there's something worth fixing, ready or not to be set right.

Her own brother would call her a tool but she’s okay with that.

The lever, the linchpin, the grease between the wheels when there are worse things than being a tool, so long as it’s the right tool that’s meant to fix the way the world’s gone wrong, the way _her_ world's gone wrong.

Pulling over onto the stretch of desert nestled between facing death down the barrel and the future of herself is a flavor of junkie adrenaline she can only imagine but never really experience fully, a bravery she can only pretend as she jerks the wheel, turns it like the neck she’s not strong enough to break but so many others are, the scream that she wrenches free doesn’t split the night into half of a whole world but she wishes it might open some pathway towards where she’s wanted, where she’s been made to travel towards, where she truly belongs.

There’s blood on her hands and it isn’t hers, isn’t some enemies, is her father’s, and she hasn’t yet made peace with the thought that he’s made his peace with her and screaming at the darkness above in the desert at night isn’t cathartic, it just feels heavy, and circumspect, judged wrongly, an edge that’s cutting her wrong. It sharpens itself on her and not the other way around, it’s dulling her edge, worsening her for the wherewithal that’s still waiting down the line for her to arrive, it’s not her windfall waiting for her.

The whiskey is a swallow in the bottle, fumes left and that’s all, no more to blur her own mind into something worthwhile, the tequila however is full-bottle, full-bodied astringent, underflavor of aromatic room deodorizer, and raw throated she screams into the desert at night and nothing, not one single thing, answers her.

To be outside of God is a brutality she cannot endure, deciding that he is still there, though quiet, listening for her prayers, not comprehending her childlike wailing on her knees in the dirt is the comfort she’s looking for.

Living only by desire has only made her thirsty, nothing humble in her all through Mexico as she’s forgotten to repent and offered nothing but ridicule and disdain in exchange for the safe passage that’s been afforded to her.

Deep in the desert it’s not God’s voice, just her own, asking first, begging then, for forgiveness of sins she can only guess she’s committed, can only expect of herself, _pride of my purpose and lust after another and envy of their surety._ Though there is nothing so sure as gravel biting into her calves and knees, nothing so beyond her comprehension as the forgiveness she’s been afforded for what she might still confess.

She’s searching, she will prevail, she’s sure, and that’s all she has faith in once she feels she’s spoken enough to the star ridden sky above her, a firmament where something surely resides, and she’s offered all of herself if only the path towards what she searches for is unearthed for her.

Pride, is there, it hasn’t gone away as she rises and returns to the driver’s side door.

Lust, returns with the inebriation, thinking of eyes, thinking of something on high answering now, definitely not Jesus, but something blood hungry that thinks it’s above all.

Envy, because someone’s had the fortitude she lacks, the kind to find or to abandon all fucking hope.

She didn’t fall having no fear, since she’s killed her father she’s been made of fear, fear of the other side of things, of how everything plays out in the end and what happens when she’s dead.

When she hadn’t been a real sinner it was easy to say she was saved, easy to believe that she was good, easy to think that there was nothing to be in fear of, but she’s not any better and that’s unfair, she thinks, to be made in some less-than shape than the others who have been redeemed and are worthy.

She still grinds the gears and the radio is still static but the sky is lightening and that’s some measure of safety, some promise that the day’s still rising on her.

* * *

Watching the bloody mouthed retinue of night creatures congregate is something so horror movie tableau he feels embarrassed at the unoriginality of and he’s hesitant only to call them out on it in case they are in fact of the taste to live vicariously through some already discovered fantasy of the feast.

The gore smeared mouths are redder than Argento but not so artistically rendered as Sergio Leone.

He’s ashamed to admit his education is lacking outside of the masterminds of heist and hold-ups, his brother might do better than naming names but Richie’s elbow deep in viscera and from the tell-tale tent in his slacks not of any inclination to be availed of his higher brain.

Seth covers up a gag with a cough and turns his eyes away.

To be together again is a privilege for the crews that would be Gecko crews.

To be a duo again is a revelation of who and what they used to be, a second coming of Christ if he were a ready and willing believer permitting themselves some sacrilegious comparison or association to the divine.

He thinks of a girl he left on the side of the road in Mexico who he might as well have made dead and feels as much regret as he’s able to feel, right now.

Being united with his elder self is not as revelatory as he’s expected and is, in truth, only half illuminating.

Richie's no big bad hiding beneath his bed, just some half-developed monster that stopped smelling of lighter fluid a long time ago.

The revelation of a gore stained mouth on the ride back is more than Seth’s expected he’d have to contend with, the self-made illusion that he’s in control vanishes in the wake of watching intestines slip past his brother’s lips and the gulp of his gullet behind the swallow of an Adam’s apple.

Their place in someone else’s world is secured by his brother’s status as something _other_ , though his own gorge had risen as Richie snapped towards a heart torn free from someone else's chest.

The time goes by, no such thing as just laying down scores anymore, just the weariness of delivery dates, muscling the monsters, collecting fucking tribute, playing a short game where he’s called feed bag too often to be biddable, convincing enough nine times out of ten to look like he's having fun.

There’s only one real game and he wonders how long he’s got to refuse before he gives in, winning depends on giving in, for the long game, at least.

Seth doesn’t know if he has it in him to keep playing for such lackluster dividends as double teaming some immortal piece of ass that no longer knows shame the same way a real woman does, or the caustic slide of some well-deserved craft cocktail, daylight spent alone, on his own, unshared and dawns he’s not ready to give up, hopes and dreams still stuck on beaches and getting fat.

They preen with every new job complete but the separation post score is palpable, it’s expected that grievances get aired, that they’re lauded and derided each in turn because his brother is the babe with a snake in his belly and he’s just some feed bag waiting to be fed from the moment cordiality declines towards uncivil again.

When a mid-boss dies speaking psalms of retribution and payment in full he’s put on edge, everyone’s made aware of how many weaknesses are hard amongst them, between them, and his brother’s practically gleeful, practically a Lord though he’ll still abide being called a selfish little prick.

The common refrain of their dissent being the death that’s on both their hands, equally if only because without them it wouldn’t have occurred, if only without _him_ it wouldn’t have happened. It’s not enough to know he’s responsible, not enough to know that his brother understands all his denials and waverings and justifications and excuses.

It doesn’t make it livable and it doesn’t make it good.

There’s only so far that exchanging blows can do, only so much a bullet can forgive, not enough and it’s not quite Richie’s fault anyway when he hadn’t been there for the majority of the ride anyway.

Pipes and chains are standard for betrayers, beaten and brutalized to death the status quo, nothing new but something they’ve expanded upon since they’ve been reunited. The fact that something’s been stolen from a stash more curio cabinet than sacrosanct bank is worrying but not upon immediate examination, it’s not unfair to say that neither of them notice, only Seth recognizes however that it’s not right as the rules of theft go.

The unseen value of something as disconcerting as the real unknown, more so because of the edge it puts them on, the ledge they’re looking to be pushed over and there’s his brother soothing his panic, as ever, as he always does. “ _He’s a force, from hell_.”

But he doesn’t want to be soothed. “ _He’s summoned.”_

They might both guess who, if they were both the same level of superstitious.

It’s quick and clean and well observed. The way things go down seems fated, unassailable, an unavoidable fate for all the snakes that have survived long echoes of time together, slaughter down to the one best betrayer, even if they don’t know how well done it is until later, until there’s time to reflect on the nature of the beast they’ve created, that they’ve perpetually been saving the other from.

If he still expects to die on a beach despite his greater failings then Seth supposes he might be entitled to fooling himself. It might just, in fact, be just what he deserves.

There’s no premonition beforehand for him of what’s coming, of what’s well deserved, no expectation of servitude or retribution or extinction within his dreams, only what comes, unavoidable, unexpected, something he doesn’t have the sense of experience to believe in at first.

Later, when is seems like fate, for real, he’s willing, ready, to accept that something beyond himself has rendered the deciding factor on his misfortune.

And by then, he’s even willing to believe he deserves it.

* * *

The sharing that happens is oftentimes revelatory, at least that’s how it feels. Inexperienced saint that he is, something unclean, holy only in intention but never in deed, he laps it up thinking of some command of the same from some movie about the viciousness of high school girls he can’t quite put his finger on, the fall from grace of some 90’s starlet rings the bell of his brain until he remembers Winona Ryder in Heathers and the words from where he’s stolen them from.

Less revelatory is anything his brother has to say, the criticism of the poll position that they’ve managed to earn. It’s the merit he’s unwilling to walk away from, no matter what else Seth might say is keeping him where the lords have deigned to put them.

That they’ve played a part in opening a door that should have stayed locked, one blown open by someone else in a fashion suiting Seth more than him is not something Richie forgets, worse things would be done to them if there were more people, _his_ people, not scattered down to ash to vote them into a different kind of existence sans breathing.

Decisions are only unanimous when one person makes them.

He’s unable to let inaccuracies go uncorrected, to not know exactly how much or how often because the new noise in his head is noticeable to more than just him.

_Pinche guero loco._

Even his own kind thinks he’s an aberration, though by and far he’s the one that quells the storm and cools the rage and keeps things ready, steady, let’s go.

Feasting to arrangements doesn’t get old.

The warehouses outside Houston are no Jackknife Jed’s but they suffice, no claustrophobic ceremonial chambers strangling the business from below.

His brother grimacing at the skills he derives from feeding like they’re STDs instead of the valuable talents they are wears on his nerves but it’s nothing worse than before. They can drink together and ride together and occasionally even fuck together but they can’t eat together anymore. Being called to account is different now that he’s no longer the wild card, he’s expedient and obedient to the decrees laid down, there’s a snake in him of the same kind that’s in the Lords, Venganza sees it, humors him because of it, right up until something’s escaped from the pit.

 _“Kill a lord, change the rules_.”

The litany of sins is long, Venganza reading his brother the riot act reminds him that Seth’s flippancy can only cover so much until he’s finished with swagger and bluster.

It’s astonishing, Richie thinks, how guiltless he feels, how much of Seth’s distemper must be because of his emotional lack, though he’s not the one that changes the subject whenever dead little girls rise up from the grave as the main subject.

The Skullfucker tells his brother to go back to his needles but it’s his own guts that churn in answer, something unsettled rolling through him.

There’s something he’s not seeing, that something’s been sent special for them doesn’t wash and the quick culling of the ranks doesn’t offer up the clarity he needs.

Venganza leaves them to attend to whatever is left when one is the only Lord left and Richie finds himself wondering what little he might actually have to do to make one of himself.

His brother sleeps holding a gun and he doesn’t sleep at all, restless with new plans inside of him he holds out against the weariness that’s made him thirsty, made him edgy, made his bones hot like he’s about to self-immolate.

A walk through the compound is fruitless, things remain intact, in place, but the feeling of something unsettled doesn’t pass and something is lingering. He explores the lay of each warehouse room, stacked with the reclaimed spoils they’ve been permitted to keep, guns, caches of cast off artifacts, booze, liberated furnishings.

He backtracks all the way to his side of the shared office, the wall safe’s contents competing for space. Case of diamonds, chalice of kings, ancient amulet, monkey’s paw, his curio cabinet collection, to trace fingers over when he’s feeling nostalgic for some imagined score.

His hand itches for something in it and the knife in his pocket is as persistent as an attached member. Staring down at obsidian he wonders what he’s been trying to shake, what’s made him so dazed, exactly what he’s standing in front of his open safe for.

He shuts the door on it and stares down at an open palm blinking back at him, the urge to open it wider comes without forethought.

He’s back in a room sharing blood and bond with a girl who’s too young for him, too good and not wise enough to life to do her any good.

“Do not forget the helpless,” he says to himself, carving an eye onto the face of his other hand, grinning down at it, and raising a brow. “Break the arm of the wicked and evildoer,” he goes on with the affectation of a recitation.

Psalms.

The sharing that happens sometimes is indelible, always on him or in him. Revelatory.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Richie turns, red handed to his brother standing in the doorway.

“Richard?” Seth hedges, like he had when he’d been holding a dead mongrel, drawing lines in the sand with the blood pouring from its mouth.

“Testing myself,” he lies as smoothly as ever, letting the blade snick back into place.

“Bullshit. It’s past dawn.”

“Wanted to see if they left anything behind.”

“Did you find it behind your desk?”

“Fuck off.”

“Eloquent.”

He passes by without incidence but his brother remains in the doorway.

“You coming?” Richie asks, tone taking on all the cadence of the one who’s most bothered.

There’s no sleep to find but he can pretend that’s what he’s doing, not going so far as stripping off his suit but taking off his shoes.

His hand is a dark scratch, Xibalban onyx subduing his automatic functions, seared into him like dreams.

* * *

_Acolytes_

She is frail and segmented in agony, a soul distressed

‘ _How long’_ , she asks, churlish and disobedient.

Something answers but it isn’t God.

Sedation is the worst they could do for her when they find that nothing can be done, she’d liken herself to some half-delirious girl saint if she were hopeful or optimistic, but even she feels fragmented and unhinged, insane. The medical staff decides what she is based on sight rather than touch or what they feel in their being to be true.

Her time in the desert in done, that much is true.

And time quickly repeats on itself, hellish regurgitation of ‘I’ve been here before?’ and ‘How many times have I done this before?’

There’s a name on the wall in blood that she hasn’t written there with the ragged press of a bleeding wrist bitten into with teeth so deep she shouldn’t still be standing, but she is and something else is keeping her upright.

It screams in some infernal key and makes sure she is unable to stay standing for long.

_Hide me in the shadow of your wings from the wicked who assail me, from my mortal enemies who surround me._

She’s forgotten some of the words, she knows as she slides over them with her mind, like a tongue touching teeth, like swallowing blood.

_They have closed their callous hearts; their mouths speak with arrogance. They have tracked us down, and now surround us; their eyes are set to cast us to the ground, like a lion greedy for prey, like a young lion lurking in ambush. Arise, O Lord confront them!_

And, something, she thinks, is still listening and it still isn’t God.

_Bring them to their knees; deliver me from the wicked by your sword, from such men, O Lord, by Your hand, from men of the world._

It’s not anything she can recognize staring back through her eyes.

It’s not even her nightmare.

* * *

He’s not comfortable with the developments he overhears through multiple sources of reliable information, peddled by less than reliable but more cowardly others.

That someone is making moves is no surprise but that no one knows who the power players are make his spine tight. He doesn’t like nameless creatures creeping around hoarding manpower and firepower for a reckoning when their own operation is meant to be one.

It isn’t so nameless but _Brasa_ is hardly enough. He doesn’t get much recognition, no identifiers float around in the ethereal under-chatter of the darker avenues of information he might frequent.

“We’re going to need to build another crew.”

His brother rolls his eyes for the moment he lifts them from his current tabletop mess of yellowing map reproductions and authentic first editions on south American demonology.

“We don’t even know what’s out there,” he stresses.

Richard ignores him this time.

He puts his gun down over the paragraph that’s so stolen his brother’s attention.

“If you want to start a crew, go start a crew, Seth. I’m busy.”

And that seems to be all the conversation his brother is capable of carrying on, at least until Seth brings up his perpetual sore spot.

“We should find someone to team up with who knows more about this than we do.”

“We have Venganza.”

“We do?” Seth turns in a circuit and raises his hands. “What? Did she go on a liquor run? We’re flying solo, Richard.”

“Ximena and Ranger Do-Good are out running recon and gathering intel.”

“I was thinking someone with a little more personal experience in killing Lords, there might be a newsletter we don’t know about.”

“I’m not calling her, Seth.”

“So, you _have_ kept her number.”

“I don’t know why you think she’ll be willing to join up with our Scooby Doo crew, I thought you were at least smarter than that.”

“Does she even know who Scooby Doo is?”

* * *

There’s something about a comfortable business model that lends itself to repetition.

He supposes the brawler cage is familiar to a stage, the throne most definitely modelled on the ones representative of the Lords that had stake in where she used to be crowned Queen every night.

Getting her alone is impossible, diversion doesn’t work more than once and distraction has a low probability of success seeing as she has a girlfriend in tow a few steps below the throne at all times but Seth solves the problem, leaves him the opening he doesn’t want as he gets his ass kicked around the cage below.

“We thought you might have some idea about who else would have a grudge.”

“Everyone has a reason to hate the Lords.”

“So there is a monthly newsletter?” He tries to grin for glibness but it does little to chip away at any chinks in the armor.

“It’s not so simple, Richard. I’m not interested in helping a last Lord claim their vengeance.”

He holds his hands in fists at his sides. “We’re not asking you too, but it not just Lords burning. It’s your people too, people that worshipped _you_.”

“I’m not a goddess Richard. I don’t deserve to be worshipped.”

“Hard to negate that image when you’ve set up an altar for yourself right here, no temple of the perpetual feast but something’s still getting sated here every night.”

He eyes the staircase, fists aching, palms itchy as he unclenches them, a headache takes shape behind his eyes. “In more ways than one.”

“Goodbye, Richard.”

And the edge sharpens, a migraine even. “This guy calls himself Brasa and he’s got a crew of escapees from your temple.”

“It was never my temple, Richard.”

He tries the ingratiating maneuver of leaning against her idiosyncratic reproduction Louis the Fourteenth. “Your prison, I get it…”

“You really don’t.”

“It get that if you were in gen pop that these guys are ultramax, I didn’t want to upset your businesses bottom line but…”

A shift in the ring stops him and the pain that’s begun to gnaw at him sharpens into an icepick behind his eyes. He winces and the supports shake.

Something stands in the ring.

* * *

_Sheol_

There’s a church that looks like the one her father served, cross and pews and fount by the door, pictures of Jesus, dust and light, it looks real but it’s not a real place.

It’s not _any_ place.

There’s a man in a black coat and dark sunglasses that looks something like how the devil might dress if he wasn’t going to wear a suit to church.

And certainly the devil on earth would be a Baptist.

That’s a joke, she thinks, scrutinizing herself into a void, unsure of the reality of her own body, the temple she’s in with its wavering walls.

She can’t remember where she saw it first, a private facebook group for pastor-preacher kids, teenage support group for the floundering of faith, her brother sending links through messenger while they sat around the Sunday school, trying to find Jesus in order to prophesize the Wi-Fi password.

“Is it really you?” the man asks taking off his dark sunglasses.

Kate opens her mouth but no answer leaves her and she finds her capacity for speech has all but disappeared, she feels a hardness make her features stern, her curiosity stunted because what could surprise her?

Certainly nothing here, and she tilts her head to consider the absolute insolence of the man holding down the back pew.

The man twitches, no, she recognizes, he _trembles_.

“It is you,” he tells the church as the walls waver again, liquid as water.

“Get out,” she commands, as _something_ commands through her mouth. “I’m not done here yet.”

“Yes, my Queen.”

Kate scoffs, turns away, the something inside of her disgusted with the man who is only a creature, the something that is in her but not of her, Kate feels pity too, for something obedient to be treated without empathy and such casual cruelty.

And suddenly she is alone again considering the sun bleached Mary beside the baptismal fount.

Alone enough, she looks over her shoulder to make sure the man has really gone.

Someone else is being called a Queen and her outerskin sweats to the heat rising in response, blood-bone deep something rattles, hisses, slithers all around her insides until she’s a frenzy of angry, vicious heat. She afraid of what’s gotten inside of her but the gratefulness overshadows it, she wouldn't even have this sweet kind of incompleteness if something else hadn’t gotten inside her the way she’d gotten inside others in the end.

“What’s your name?” she asks moving her fingers in traceries over Mary’s porcelain feet.

The abysmal, hungry thing inside of her doesn't lower itself to answer but Kate can feel the impression of its disdain.

“Neither of us are going to get out of here anytime soon so we might as well try to keep each other sane.”

An abbreviated laughs claps sharply in the upper reaches of the church’s steeple, bell waving, making ghost music up above her head.

The heat outside moves in waves, like snakes floating above the ground.

Snakes cover the ground under a blood red sky before she blinks the vision away, back in the comfort of what she knows her own mind has created, the four walls that even now have become claustrophobic and small.

She’s living inside a pen or the belly of a greater beast where sanity isn’t long for the world.

* * *

When they’re left to clean up the mess of several chewed apart sets of remains, most half devoured, others more obviously torn asunder for sport, he has a chance to reflect upon the need for allies that are not _fucking_ cowards.

Or dames, he’ll add, and certainly not monsters who look like real girls.

He tells his brother so and is shoved so viciously that the wall cracks dust behind his sorely abused shoulder blades.

“I’m just fucking saying.”

“Well, stop fucking saying,” Richie counters ineffectually.

Seth can’t help the posturing that presents itself once he’s pushed away from where he’s been pushed and slapped the dust from his slacks. “She fucking _rode_ away,” he says, waving out an arm. “What else would you call her, Richie?”

“Big words from a guy that did the same thing. Or do you not remember leaving a teenage girl behind.”

“I didn’t drive away.”

“No, you walked. Is that better? It just seems fucking slower to me.”

“I was trying to stay away from her because when we were together a Lord’s mercenary put a sawed off to her face and almost pulled the fucking trigger. She ran away from you, Richard. Not me.”

“Because of her brother.”

“No, that’s not why. She ran down that fucking hill to get shot because she couldn’t count on you to help her and it doesn’t fucking matter now, does it? Because she’s dead.”

Richard is close enough to do damage but keeps himself steady. “I told you your stupid plan wouldn’t work. I told you she didn’t want anything to do with this.”

Seth ignores the obvious conclusion that they aren’t clean-handed in the bloodbath that’s brought itself to completion, they won’t bear the weight of it over their two backs alone. Santanico will need to live with another dead lover, and ungenerous as the thought is, Seth can’t help but think that they all end up that way by design more than accident.

It is her fault that his brother belongs more to something Seth feels hunted by than their past shared synchronization for the scores. Everything they’ve earned they’ve had taken away, he nearly waves an arm and says just that but it doesn’t feel like the time to bring up old wounds like Jackknife’s.

His guilty conscience is overactive, in the ring, beside his brother in the aftermath, he thinks he’s heard something, no mistaking it for the chastisements and soft psalms he’s heard before though nothing is there with him.

But that’s what guilt does, it haunts.

Something is about to happen, a storm, something coming down from the mountain Uncle Eddie might say, or someone else laying tracks down for something to run right through them, it’s just a feeling, a tightness behind his eyes or an itch in his balls.

The drive back is tense, if there's a word, devoid of conversation, the radio is little buffer against the feeling.

“We’re missing something,” he tells his brother.

Richie’s reflection blinks. “You feel it too?”

Seth laughs, can’t help it, readjusting his grip on the steering wheel. “Hard to fucking miss.”

* * *

That he’s partially responsible for another massacre of near innocents doesn’t particularly distress so much as inconvenience him.

To be fair to himself though, he rationalizes that the woman everyone references as his ex has been responsible for far more bloodshed than he can even hope to achieve alone and he’s an amateur by comparison.

He tastes something like sulfur and ozone on the back of his tongue, some cosmic combination that brings, strangely, to mind Isaac Asimov’s idea of robot space and a high school chem lab, burning metal and hormones, a brain burnout he can’t escape the stink of.

He tastes blood.

It makes sense to him when he fed before bed, before dawn, when he can still understand his own awareness enough to understand that he’s in a dream.

He’s seeing her die on the dusty wooden platform they left her on except that this time she can’t put up the fight to say no to being saved.

He tastes blood and most of it is hers.

But not all of it. “What do I taste like?” she asks, red eyed, full of holes.

His dreams shift abruptly, prophetic shift change jarring his sense of self as much as his sense of time or place.

He’s below Jackknife’s with a slashed hand and an empty throne listening to the underground hum, under-earth, somewhere closer to Hell than anywhere else.

“You’re not quite the King yet, are you Richard?” Malvado asks, half torn face grinning. “Nothing’s really gone to plan for you, has it? No Kingdom, no nubile maidens, no army.”

“You’re the dead man, jefe.”

“Maybe so, want to know what she tastes like?”

Richie doesn’t answer.

“She tastes like a corpse.”

“You’d know, I guess,” he answers, not allowing real emotion to creep in.

“Thanks to you, mi hijo. You keep it all up here,” Malvado tells him, tapping at his temple.

Ghostly whispers, final sighs and rasps from somewhere beyond the limits of his vision hiss around him, alone below everything he’s not quite as alone as he’s hoped.

_“She’s not some Queen.”_

He turns too quick, spooks the spook into disappearing.

_“Queens don’t act like that.”_

He refuses to look over his shoulder.

_“They’re worse, you know, because they’re not scared of the blood.”_

That he can smell just that in the movement of the air makes him doubt his subconscious guilt as more than a dream, he can't remember ever having a dream with a smell in it before.

Blood aerosolizes into a fine mist and drips from his eyelashes.

He sees for a second time something rip the small human woman asunder face first, then an arm, artless really, and she hadn’t quite been dead, just close enough to linger in pain long enough to deliver a parting shot towards the woman he’d thought he’d loved, did love, once, against the woman she loved now, right then, will forget because she’s ageless.

He wakes up and stretches wide across the bed, vulnerable for a moment in a sprawl of limbs to a banging on his bedroom door.

* * *

_Disciples_

In her is an urge for something, restlessness never settling in a place where there’s no fatigue and no hunger and no desire, it feels like Hell, she thinks, not nothing, but nothing of sustenance or reward.

The man comes and goes, sitting in to visit or spill cryptic thoughts in front of her like she’s some standing confessional, she looks forward to it in a place where time is unstructured and incomplete.

“It’s not time yet, you said that, but we must prepare.”

“For what?”

“For your arrival.”

Like many things he says, the thought is an untethered line cast into her, unspooling.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she answers, sullen.

“You will not always feel this way,” the man answers before he is gone again and time stands still, the sun marking the same spot on the wall.

Sick of the little world she paces and the world changes. A wall made of tablets shivers below the top image of a lean, wary savior. The hierarchy of some cruel place forms in depictions done in red, shapes pent in Hell and all the rest, she thinks to something else’s ongoing amusement.

 _“For your ascension_ ,” a whisper swept in on the brief breath of the wind says.

It’s easy to wait when it’s the only thing there is to do.

A pain stops her short, steals her inhale, blood seeps through her thin shirt, floods down the waist of her jeans and down her pant leg, she stumbles, catches herself until her arm collapses under the weight of her slouch.

She falls and she bleeds.

It doesn’t feel like the first time.

* * *

“Venganza being MIA is just one more fucking thing. Funny that we’re being targeted and she’s the one in hiding.”

“Call the Peacekeeper.”

“He hasn’t been picking up his phone.”

At his scrolls Richie looks as impatient as a kid during show and tell ready to pass around his wares. “What about this hunter, the one called Ilhicamina.”

Ximena calls the guy a fairytale and leaves them to find her wayward Lord who has left them all to their own devices, to their own impending dooms.

“So now what? A scavenger hunt?” he asks, turning to his brother.

“Go fuck yourself,” Richie counters dispassionately.

“Don’t forget your scrolls, Indiana Jones,” Seth calls out behind him as he goes.

The ranch is half dude ranch, half hell stable when they arrive, ranks of culebra bleed venom weakly in fatigue and pain.

Tanner is there, tied unkindly to a post, it’s a bit of humor in the wake of how fucked up things truly are.

Old man Xibalban hunter proves his worth and makes it seem easy, the Ranger drives away, the Professor offers thanks unequal to the effort they’ve gone through to keep him unneutered, if only by consequence.

“How many more of these guys are there waiting to crawl up onto earth?” he asks Burt as the hunter’s cutting off a trophy.

“How many armies does it take to kill or subjugate everything in existence besides the chosen few?” Burt answers, waving. “Your brother knows what I mean.”

When he looks at Richie he is staring out beyond the range in a manner he is not at all comfortable with.

* * *

Back in the Temple of the Nine Lords he feels something.

Ilhicamina comes down the stairs bearing little forgiveness or love of subtlety. “Ximena, you know what this is. It’s her.”

Seth’s head lifts. “Her? Her who?”

Burt smirks, eyes on Ximena. “Amaru.”

Ximena scowls and shakes her head. “We don’t know that.”

“What else would it be calling up her legions, raising her generals from the grave. Her blood got into them and now she’s _in_ them.”

“Wait, you mean the bloodwell?” Richie asks on the realization of the only thing it could be.

Burt snaps, “Bingo!”

“Why’s she after Venganza?” his brother asks.

A tale of war and cannibalism follows the likes of Titus Andronicus: a disposed queen taken apart and devoured by her slaves, vengeance, savagery.

“And who got a piece of her this time?” Ilhicamina asks.

“Carlos, for one,” Seth says, starting the list, “and a bunch of no-names that got dead. Some of our previous employ.”

Richie clears his throat on what throttles it.

“What?” his brother asks.

“Scott. Scott was there.”

“Whose Scott?” Ximena asks with notable curious irritation.

“A kid who deserves better than to be turned into some blood queen’s slave. I know where he is. I was trying to track him down before Tanner’s kids started disappearing.”

His brother raises a hand and ducks his head like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. “You were tracking him down, before all of this?”

“We saw Brasa looking at a poster for his band, thought he might be a fan,” the Ranger imparts.

* * *

_Red Right Hand_

Her safe little piece of some in-between is changing.

There is no church, only the vista of a red sky and red sand and humid air that smells like the inside of something’s ripped open chest cavity.

In the forever away horizon something paces, how true to size it is remains to be seen.

“Niña, you look good. For a dead girl.”

The voice startles her, familiar as it is. She turns whip quick, angry, enraged, righteous. And she moves with a speed that’s uncanny for her own unreal form, but she moves and catches Carlos by the throat.

“Now, Mija,” he chokes, “no estés preocupada, todo se arreglará.”

“Is it though?” her hand tightens and his toes scrape the ground as she pulls him closer, stares up at his ruddy face.

“You killed me and now I’m in Hell.”

“Yes,” he coughs.

She holds him there above her, strangling for a moment too short of consigning him to final darkness, lets go to scream, kicks him with a savagery she doesn’t recognize.

He reaches for her boot, holds onto it and her rage only flares as he speaks to her. “I can’t help you if you keep kicking me, Kate!” he calls out, a laugh lunging up.

Her mouth opens on a puerile complaint, falls further in incredulous disbelief. “Help me?” she says, words fumblesome in her mouth. “You can’t help me,” she answers, turning away, walking, until she’s leagues away, pacing on the horizon, as far as she can get under a red sky over red earth inside the chest cavity of some greater god.

 _“_ _All my enemies will be ashamed and dismayed; they will turn back in sudden disgrace.”_ She hears behind her, trailing along on the acrid wind.

* * *

“So, what have you been up to? Fertile river valley and all, yeah, that,” he asks on an open wide exhale.

Burt blows out a drag and doesn’t answer right away. “You think you’re done, but you’re never really done. Not when you always get the job done. That’s your problem, maybe you need to give less of a fuck about the outcome.”

His high degrades into antipathy for the man that he thinks knows nothing about him. “Who the fuck asked you.” He takes the bottle with him as he goes with something that’s not quite a strut, not quite a stumble but his approximation of even stepped when so inebriated.

Facing down the future is a difficult prospect when there are so many monsters they’re going to have to kill still to come.

He loathes the work it entails, bloody, meaningless, unsalvageable chaos, the hack and slash does them little justice, but needs before wants.

He doesn’t wonder after his brother, where he is or what’s keeping him, knowing can be worse, knowing is overrated, Seth figures.

He has a plan and he doesn’t like it, what they’re going to need to do. He calls the Ranger, hangs up before he answers. The Ranger calls him back and he ignores it until the man himself walks in.

“Stop blowing up my phone, I’m right here. Are you drunk?”

“I can still drive better than you.”

“I doubt you can piss in a straight line right now, so maybe we shouldn’t try. What’s the urgency?”

“You said you know where the kid is, so lets go and get him.”

* * *

At the ranch he feels what he felt in the temple, something is close, a palpable presence, heavy air and intention everywhere. He walks unbidden over the rough, dry landscape that’s cracking in the heat, the ranch far away under the moonlight everyone’s left him alone in.

He’s claimed the need to stay and observe, to linger on the purpose of finding some clue, his brother needs to sleep, The Ranger needs to find someone, Tanner needs to tend to his herd and Burt needs another toke.

Seth mumbles something about him chasing after footnotes again and Richie sighs, tired but not deterred, there’s still something he has to do, something calling him to purpose.

Something’s made an army here, something is sealed away, hiding in plain sight.

He feels like he’s being pulled along, hand in hand with something that needs to be set free.

At the rock face with the wind rising at his back he doesn’t need to _feel_ anything to know where the missing have gone, what their slaves do, lingering somewhere beyond or behind, they line the darkened horizon behind him like dolls cut from black construction paper holding hands.

He considers the way before him, considers the bare faced, crumbling mesa stone, considers the way it looks like a door sealed shut against the world.

The outline of the image on his hand forms one long bleeding line.

The red right hand he raises unlocks the world that’s waiting and the earth rumbles, pushed low under its ascension. 


	2. Chapter 2

_Inequity_

Sometimes he wonders what his father would think of what he does to eat, _more than sometimes_ , but he usually ends up pushing it aside in favor of ministering to masses of his own. “ _Spill some blood for the Lord!”_

The idea of missionary work never appealed to him when he was human, always thinking that priests who caught malaria got off easy compared to the others who got what they deserved, being feasted upon by the aboriginal peoples of unexplored islands.

Inexplicably he is one now, a missionary, and a cannibal too. It strikes him that so was Carlos Madrigal on a strange shore centuries ago in a world that wasn’t really his.

Somewhere on the line that defines men of faith Scott considers his color on the litmus test between righteousness and fanaticism. His bandmates have no such qualms, no internal quagmire to navigate, no existential quandaries, not like he does.

But, he thinks, none of them were adopted and none of them had parents whose careers were Jesus, none of them have dead moms and there’s not a single abduction story between them.

He’s being uncharitable but he’s always been the outsider in his own peer group, for forever, and he understands that there is a limit to their middle-class white kid understanding. It’s still better than solitude and a band needs more than a front man.

On board the bus he feels the discomfort of being watched, has felt it for days, maybe weeks, between gigs it’s hard to tell between the satiation and stage energy and what exactly it is he’s feeling, if it’s him feeling it at all and not the pulls he’s taken off of someone else pulling him down into another dark night of the soul.

The nights he eats something introspective are memorably bleak because he’s not on his journey to God, he’s stuck thinking of where he’s been and what exactly he’s been doing.

He wonders what the fuck he’s doing, can’t quantify what his nights are building or buying and he doesn’t have the confidence that his father would be very proud of him after all.

* * *

The searchlight of a sun god makes it easy to find her brother, using the light of the ones that’ve been burned along the way to illuminate the road forward, they crumble like the lit end of a cigarette gone unattended for too long.

He doesn’t know he’s being watched, doesn’t recognize the obvious. She wants so badly to reach out through the boundaries but can’t stretch her reality far enough to touch real life again.

“ _And he’s the one who gets to live. Is that fair?”_

She tells what’s spoken to shut up and it does, but somewhere behind her it’s smirking, or sneering, next to the statue of Mary mimicking the hands extended in supplication and benediction.

Kate feels the itch of her own scowl crawl across her face.

_“He plays missionary only so he gets to eat.”_

There’s something snagging on the intentions she has of finding her brother, of something else finding him, of what it wants him for.

 _“He never did really try to save you, he’s a coward._ ”

She’s unsure if it’s a thought of her own or the thing lurking in the places behind the scenes of the little steepled church, something tenacious if not yet strong enough to take front stage.

Everyone has their use, her brother is fulfilling his, her own use is a question she can’t ask herself, feigning usefulness makes her feel weary, the real questions are what is wanted of her, what is she going to be asked to do and that makes her wary.

What can she do?

The feelings of defeat are not her own, but betrayal is fresh in her mind and her unseen companion’s in their self-made purgatory. She turn to where Mary waits, a shadow behind the statue, dark and sinister, moves there like it’s made of snakes.

“What did they do to you?” Kate asks it.

_“The same thing they did to you.”_

“I don’t know what they did to me,” Kate admits.

_“Yes, you do.”_

“No, I don’t,” Kate lies.

* * *

Getting tricked is no great pleasure. His brother being out again raws his nerves.

When he calls Richie the line trills for the uncomfortable amount of time between immediate response and the fourth ring. “Where are you?” he asks when the line picks up. Barely have the words left his mouth than the answer pushes back at him from the other side of the receiver, making him take a physical step back.

“Busy, talk later.” And the asshole hangs up.

Gone after the kid like an amateur or at the bar again, the one he owns and plays boss in the backroom from, feeding, fucking, _ruminating_ , it doesn’t matter, Richie should be with him.

The Ranger is probably there too, Ximena will tag along if only because it means avoiding Burt.

“This isn’t really a group meeting with just dos hombres, killer,” Tanner quips with conversational distraction from a pile of manuscripts Seth can’t read. “I have a job you know,” Tanner adds.

“Coercing coeds?” Seth counters, biting down on the uneasiness slithering through his guts, not knowing what’s out there with his brother, not comfortable with his ignorance.

“I’ve never gone of the lam with one, is your brother coming or not, speaking of level three offenders?”

Seth sits, puts his feet on top of an open book’s unblemished pages, stretches out his legs to make a pile of them fall from the edge they’ve been balanced on.

Tanner’s slit eyes flash.

“Didn’t you hear?” Seth asks. “He’s busy.”

“He’s gone after the little drummer boy, hasn’t he?”

Seth shrugs, hoping it says loudly enough, ‘who the fuck cares,’ that he doesn’t actually have to say it.

“Why would they even want him?”

“The same reason they came after me and the family, they don’t want us organizing. The good black hat said this sun god, Brasa, has been frequenting houses of worship. How does an empire keep its power? Dismantling the religious centers, the communities, the schools of thought that go against their own political dogma. Strong, organized, educated, movements led by powerful, charismatic leaders bring down empires all the time.”

“Thanks for the dissertation. Think I’ll drop the class,” Seth counters, rising roughly, swinging an arm at another pile of books to Tanner’s outcry.

* * *

The blood shtick is interesting but sloppy and it’s hard to believe the kid thought it up on his own and didn’t see it in some movie.

Richie nurses a drink at the bar, out of place enough to be noticed from on stage, the set cut short precedes an escape out the back not quick enough to miss him as he slips out while their still packing up the bus.

He gets on and waits for someone to notice him plucking a string on the forsaken bass, they don’t, until he snaps it with a twang. Scott pales visibly once he catches sight of him waiting all back of the bus and waiting for a punchline.

“This tour bus reminds me of the rambler, just more heathen. You haven’t noticed any monster movie assholes hanging around have you, Bruce Lee?” Richie asks.

“Hey fuck you man!” a kid with a middle aged PTA mom’s haircut exclaims from the back of the single file line onto the bus.

“Easy,” Richie answers, rising, hands raised to his waist, like it’s a dog he’s trying to pet and not a snake he’s trying to wrangle.

“You know this asshole?” some other douche asks.

Scott puffs up, glares, then breaks eye contact to answer his bandmate in a denim vest. “I’m about my music now otherwise we wouldn’t be talking.” He looks down at Richie. “Fuck off,” Scott tells him.

“Scott,” Richie tries.

“You heard him, Buddy Holly,” the mandatory band chick with a cute haircut jumps in, less cowed than the other two superfluous kids.

“You’re not safe, Scott.”

“Neither are you if you don’t get the fuck off the bus, Richie.”

He raises his hands again, fully committed to returning but looking like he’s fine with being dismissed. He’s left in the cloud of diesel fumes as the bus crunches over the parking lot gravel, watches in its wake as Scott Fuller flips him off from the emergency exit door before the lurching monstrosity heaves itself onto the bypass road leading to the next highway.

* * *

_Peril_

His bandmates don’t look particularly put at ease. The arrival of a suit doesn’t lend to avoiding panic. Dodgy backstories aside they do eat people to survive and their menagerie of various other crimes leave them suspicious of anyone who looks put together enough to be a good ol’ boy or a crime boss.

An angry question bordering on accusation arises over the sound of the buses shitty exhaust: “Who the fuck was that asshole?”

“He’s nobody,” Scott mutters, moving away and keen on appearing busy with his axe in the back of the bus, hoping they’ll leave it alone.

The kinder feminine refrain: “Scott, come on, talk to us.”

He turns the screws on himself as he tunes. “He’s the reason my sister’s dead.” He doesn’t look up at the expressions he knows are there. “Part of the reason,” he tells his friends, correcting himself, strumming easily, tuning the axe towards distortion, feeling scooped out and hollow, facing down his own emptiness in a world he’s utterly fucking alone in. An orphan again .

“That guy killed your sister and you just let him go?”

He doesn’t feel anything. He tries to remember the youth pastor’s song repertoire, comes up empty as he picks the strings aimlessly.

“I killed her too,” he tells them. “We both did. Either of us could have turned her but we were both too chickenshit to actually fucking do it. So, she’s dead now.”

He’s a coward. Back to the reality of his existence, he’s not on a different plane, not some godly missionary traveling, he’s only cursed to wander, what’s worse is his complete lack of purpose, his meager self-justifications crumbling.

He whispers to his axe, it doesn’t go unnoticed.

“What? Scott?”

“‘You will never call me to account,’” he repeats the psalm, amending it into something singable. “The wicked man renouncing god, ‘You will never call me to account.’ Take in hand my trouble, my grief, entrust it all to me, trust me victim, I’m a helper. Break my hand of trouble, I am wicked, evildoer, yeah. Call me to account, call me to account until there’s nothing left to find.”

“Heavy, man.”

Scott scoffs. Heavy is his whole life.

* * *

An alphabet of pain lies waiting to be uncovered, letter by letter. The first one appears through the illusion.

Carlos Madrigal lingers like some pungent aftertaste and then the man in black when he’s gone.

Brasa, he says his name is from behind dark sunglasses, upending the glass Carlos had been sipping tequila from moments prior to his inexplicable exit.

 _“Brasa, my queen._ Do not rebuke me in Your anger, or discipline me in Your wrath. Be merciful to me for I am frail; heal me, for my bones are in agony. My soul is deeply distressed. How long, my Queen, how long?”

“Stop that,” she snaps, “right now.”

“You need to learn the language of it before you can see its beauty.”

It just looks red, the whole world, whatever world _this_ is.

There’s a sound like a heartbeat when the wind blows, though it doesn’t feel like wind, only subtle movement, some insidious progression of the invisible, insensible.

Something is breathing around her she realizes belatedly.

“Where are we?”

“We are in the devil’s waiting room, Kate.” Carlos tells her, returned.

Kate sniffs, turns to where the man stands self-assured and smarmy, black gloved and high collared like there’s some kind of dress code, he smiles, it might be charming if he weren’t playing Virgil.

“The devil doesn’t live here,” she counters, unbearably tired.

“The devil lives in you Kate, oh. I’ve overstayed my welcome. Brasa, my man!”

The wavering space where the man was standing steams, Brasa behind her becomes a wall of heat.

“You are still weak, my Queen.”

“I’m not your Queen,” Kate finds herself remarking, walking away, walking towards, walking around, the world is cyclical, a room without corners.

Brasa looks sad, if the inclined head is anything to draw a conclusion from.

“No, she’s been gone from this realm, and all others, for millennia now. Still, her presence of spirit has remained and now it’s in you, Kate.”

_Katerina._

She turns and screams in frustration and a wall of the world crumbles, roots torn free from the force of her will to disperse the something like a spirit that mocks and mimics and lingers.

* * *

“You disappear for days and want me to be cool? What the fuck do you think this is? Rescue mission? We still don’t even _know_ where the fuck Venganza is! We need to focus on maintaining our operation and circling the wagons here, not chasing teenagers and playing babysitter, _Richie_ ,” Seth tries to make his brother understand.

“He’s a target, if we can pick him up and get him here we can see who comes for him and gather more intel on exactly what the fuck we’re dealing with, _Seth_.”

“We’re dealing with demons, from _Hell_ , Richard. What other info is there that you can’t find in the books you brought here, or are they just around for me to trip on?”

“We need a plan!” Richie shouts back like it will win him the argument.

“You’re not coming up with one! You’re chasing down a guilt trip for a pity jerk.”

Four sets of eyes follow them back in forth followed by the cloud of smoke exhaled as Burt coughs for notice.

“You know, I think you two have some stuff to work out,” he tells them, tapping ash onto the floor.

Ximena looks put out, stony face unmoving across the room, arms crossed tight, stiff in her encasement of leather, temple twitching, a vein standing out as she clenches her jaw.

Tanner tips his glasses down and rubs between his eyes with a finger, looking remarkably _normal_.

“We should keep an eye on Scott, if he won’t come to us we wait until something goes to find him. It won’t be hard, they posted their tour schedule…everywhere,” the Ranger remarks, pulling the information up on his phone and raising the screen to show them with a florescent wave.

“That’s considerate,” Burt deadpans on a wheeze.

* * *

He catches up with them at their next gig, the tension obviously causing some strain, the band is breaking up. The guitar bridge sticking out of one member’s chest is something like a hint.

“Calm down,” Riche says as they turn towards him and Scott listens. “I didn’t come here to fight,” Richie adds.

The immolated remains stick heavy on the air as he walks through them, cloying and tacky in the back of his throat. “Creative differences?” he asks smearing a toe through the greasy ash.

There’s an outcry from the remaining band members though Scott raises an arm to forestall their unnecessary involvement.

“You’re in danger Scott,” Richie tells him

To punctuate his point a death rattle screams out from above them, heralding another Xibalban’s arrival.

“What the fuck was that?” the keyboardist asks looking scared in her ripped stockings.

“Something we shouldn’t stick around for, let’s go,” Scott tells her, pushing her towards the front of the bus.

He lets them go, exiting carefully down the narrow steps, so he can see what goes after them, so he can plan accordingly, the phone he’s palmed from the girl has the kid’s number in it. The line trills three times before Scott picks up.

“Don’t hang up, look out the window. Those motorcycles, that’s them. Don’t stop,” Richie says, tailing from behind.

Scott makes some exclamation he doesn’t pay attention to before he throws the phone to the passenger seat.

He follows, fast, catches up, scratches the paint job by side swiping one bike, pretty sure that the spectacular wipe out behind the bus, punctuated by a bright expulsion of a fuel tank’s contents into a vertical display of bright loud fire means that at least one Jaguar Warrior is out of commission.

“Why the fuck did you come!” Scott yells over the phone.

“I came to help your ungrateful ass, they’re going to kill your friends, you need to get off the bus,” Richie yells.

“Okay, Fast and Furious.”

“Listen, Tokyo Drift we don’t have time for this. You are never going to outrun them with the Magic School Bus.”

The jolt of the cougar heralds an arrival on the roof from the crowding close bus, he wobbles but straightens out as a face comes over the windshield.

“Hold on,” he says, foot heavy on the gas.

* * *

_Distress_

He can’t sleep even though the sun’s come up and it feels like his eyes are ready to bleed.

Current events are impossible not to dwell on.

Jumping from a bus onto a car had been sick, the ensuing chase had been fast enough to be sickening however and he’s feeling the after effects. That something is after him, knows him, can find him, feels like a divine hand reaching out for him.

The entire place smells like an ashtray floated by whisky and whatever cologne Seth Gecko wears too much of but doesn’t realize.

Scott can’t lay waiting in a borrowed bed to be found by what’s out hunting for them, when he gets up he finds that he’s not the only one still awake. He climbs up into the warehouse’s walks to look down at a table spread of weathered texts, over Richie Gecko’s vulnerable shoulders. Scott firms his grip on a piece of the walk he could rip free and push down to where his heart lies.

Richie turns a page with the edge of a black knife Scott recognizes.

His grip tightens on the edge of the walk.

“Go to bed, Scott.” Richie says, not looking up.

“No bedtimes on the weekend,” he says, hearing the answering chuckle.

“Then come down and help me read through this.”

“What is it?”

“Research.”

“That’s Sex Machine’s bag, not mine.” And he goes, unapologetic and completely fucked up.

* * *

The world around her has changed, opened wide, a sky the correct color overhead. Her backyard in Bethel, the front steps of her highschool, the inside of a living room she doesn’t recognize that smells like an old Zippo, the underground of Jackknife Jed’s, the Labyrinth, a place of stone pillars that smells of blood in offering bowls, a Panadería hiding a shrine in the back room.

It’s not all built from just her memory.

“The World isn’t just yours.”

The insolence of a lesser creature makes the world turn over in her displeasure and suddenly she stands on the opposite bank of a river of blood from Carlos.

“Woah, culture shock. Didn’t know you had this much Lucifer in you Kate.”

She hisses in a language not her own as something sliding across her crown hisses too.

“Looks like you’ve gone a little stir crazy, Kate.”

She looks down where her feet are dusted in the dirt of the plaza but her nails are freshly painted, a black snake moves between her ankles.

Carlos simpers against a gloved fist like he doesn’t want to show her his smile. “I think you found a friend.”

Her hands open, palms scored by her nails, calm only because she’s forced herself to be. “Do you want to be my pet?” she asks, not knowing where the words come from, not knowing what language she’s said them in.

And he looks afraid, like he should.

“You play with me and I’ll play with you and you won’t know the meaning of the word until you’ve been played with by me,” she says, the words tasting familiar, somehow.

Someone, somewhere, laughs and the snake coils up her leg and onto her hanging arm.

* * *

Something comes out of the dark, a familiar little shadow, quick and spry.

“You’re too slow, you know,” the kid tells him, crouched at his feet. “The Mad Max Thunderdome dudes are back.”

“Who rules Thunderdome, kid?” ready and waiting for an inevitable rumble.

“…”

The blank expression he gets is disappointing. He sighs and raises his own gun. “Master Blaster, let’s go kid.”

They go but they don’t do well, penned in by cat people on motorcycles until the baddie in the big black coat snaps them away and pulls the kid free from their ring, Seth lunges after but a blow gun makes enough of an appearance to warn him back, he hates that it cows him, bites down on an impulse to move anyway but his brother comes up from behind, gun drawn, ready, so Seth backs down.

Brasa turns, unconcerned, Scott in hand and Seth feels the helplessness drain into doom. They have no allies and they have no better odds waiting to be drawn.

The man’s eyes pulse behind his glasses. “Now, Mr. Gecko, I could melt that bullet, please.”

It doesn’t sound like ‘please,’ it sounds like ‘roll over’.

He doesn’t lower his gun, he drops it when the chain hits his hand as a bike goes around.

They’ve lost, he realizes, all at once.

* * *

Brasa looks him up and down. “It’s a tricky thing,” he says as the scorch of his hand forestalls any kind of counterattack. “To be her servant is also to be the servant of something new. We are both beholden to that.”

Richie offers his palms, third eye stuck shut for now, until he’s close enough. “Whatever man, I’m just here for the kid, let him go.”

The way the Ranger, arriving from the gloom, levels his pump-action is business like, his disbelief not impacting his sightline in the least. His hands are steady. “Richie, what the fuck are you doing?”

What he tries to do is open his eye but it blinks shut from the heat and the light and then he’s got a hand folded over his heart that is not his own, he exhales and watches Brasa place his fingers like a hot knife against Scott’s sternum.

“Keep your distance Peacekeeper. I don’t have to take his heart, I could take any part I chose. A hand maybe? Both? No more music, no more hands clasped in vicious prayer. His tongue maybe, it will sizzle like a piece of bacon.”

Richie tries to force his eye open again but the wet heat on his palm feels like tears he cannot see through. “Brasa, come on,” he says, playing the pleading man.

And the man who is not a man raises a brow above his dark sunglasses, eyes like red coals behind them.

“You would like to negotiate, Gecko?” Brasa smiles, opens a hand in invitation. Get in the truck. Or I kill him.”

* * *

_Double Heart_

He’s not afraid of something he’s been through more than once.

Abduction has become something of a hobby for him, minor enslavement, doing someone else’s bidding, he’ll do it because he still values his life, even if he has to earn it by blood.

His father would be ashamed.

But Scott’s unbothered. Suicide by filial guilt only means the late Pastor Jacob has little presence to stand on when it comes to his children and the family habit of self-destruction doesn’t continue with him, but then, he thinks, he’s adopted anyway.

“What’d you tag along for? I didn’t need your help,” he hisses to the man slouched beside him.

“You’d be barbeque. This is the fastest way to get to him.”

“Barbeque, funny,” Scott breathes, reaching out to push a pig carcass on its hook. “If you ask me, it seems like he wanted you to come along.”

Richie grins, teeth threatening to chatter, “He’ll regret it.”

Scott wants to ask him something, wants to ignore him, can’t do either, ends up staring at him until he speaks.

“Kate wouldn’t want you to die like that,” Richie tells him, breath puffing.

Scott scoffs. “She basically told me I was a hateful asshole and that you should go to Hell. Don’t act like you know what she would have wanted.”

“I know she loved you.”

Scott’s hands are numb. “Love is over-fucking-rated.”

“She would have died for you,” Riche says, lips blue, hugged into his suit jacket so tightly the sleeves groan.

“She did die for me and it changed absolutely fucking nothing, I’m still in the back of a fucking meat van with you!” He’s getting colder, hate not warming him like he wishes it would as he kicks the metal floor of the truck.

They don’t speak after that, freezing in their own private ninth circles, Scott’s not afraid of what’s going to happen, just anxious to live or die, chalks it up to survival anxiety or the shock he’s going into now as his breath leaves him in heavier exhales and smaller clouds, core temp falling.

When Brasa finally heaves open the doors, a pillar of heat in at what seems like the far end of the world, he catches himself starting to crawl across the truck bed toward him.

The monster laughs and holds him in place by raising a hand.

“This isn’t your stop, Scott.”

Richard goes, instead, a laborious rise, stumbling, looking for an opening, not finding it by the way he’s screaming on the other side of the doors Brasa shuts again.

Scott listens numbly to what must be torture happening not far from the truck, sighs another cloud, wondering if all that will be left for Seth Gecko to find of his brother will be ash.

There was nothing left of Kate to find when he went back. A body is best. The ashes that will blow away will be something that lingers on Seth Gecko’s mind for a long time.

The screaming stops and the truck rumbles to life under his legs, he stops thinking of his sister as the cold settles in deeper, he can’t think of anything anymore as he falls into something like hibernation, dreaming of places he’ll never go back to again, of people he’ll never see.

* * *

There’s a distance between them, the same as always, the same as when they were kids and he was still an ocean away, when she was waiting for her parents to bring him home, a too serious toddler with an unpronounceable name and no English language skills. And now there’s a veil like a wall of muscle between them, heart strings like a net and a cage of bones to get through first and she wants to scream. She does scream.

The distance feels so much more like punishment for something she’s done, the last person who knows her isn’t equipped to recognize her entrapment for what it is, the penance for being too prideful to live like he does.

There’s an awful gnawing on her soul, the not so insidious slip of something inside her skin which already feels worn, the unwelcomed thing that she has welcomed out of boredom and the prospect of forever with herself and the ghost of a culebran hustler.

“Not quite El Rey is it? Not what any of us were looking for,” a more jovial voice asks than the subtle insinuation that usually counters her more egregious or self-pitying thoughts.

A man with half a whole face gleams a red smile at her.

“I don’t have time for another lost soul,” she tells Malvado.

“Oh, I’m not lost, Kate. I’m exactly where I belong, just not where I expected to be.”

“Where did you end up, Hell?”

“I’m home. Right where I started,” he tells her, looking pensive, looking forlorn as he takes in the scenery like he remembers it a little. “My brother isn’t here either,” he adds. “But brothers are overrated. I’m sure at least one Gecko would agree with me.”

“I don’t agree with you.”

And Malvado doesn’t look so sure himself. “Scott’s not really your brother. He’s adopted, he’s not really your blood and blood is what matters. I tracked my brother done through the centuries just for blood,” he says despite the look on his face telling her all she needs to know about how he feels about his brother.

Kate scowls. “I remember,” she answers, mouth pulling like she’s tasted something foul.

She walks and Malvado walks beside her.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he tells her.

“Oh, yeah?” she answers with unexpected wryness, kicking at the dust.

“That I’m better company than Carlos.”

She doesn’t laugh and his face falls, the half with skin on it.

“You said that you ended up right back where you started, where are we?” she asks.

“You don’t know?”

She pins him with a look that turns the red musculature of his face pinkish.

“This is Xibalba, the slave quarters penned in by the curving river of blood named after the great serpent consort. I was born here.”

“You belong here,” she tells him with the undercurrent of someone else’s rage. “You’ve always belonged right here. Crawling in the dirt with the worms.”

He looks at her and his image dissipates in a red mist, blown aside by the wind and, again, she’s as alone as she can be with the other that lives inside of her, the both of them in a cage made especially for it, for them.

“I’m tired,” she tells the thing that’s as close to her as her shadow as her path leads her up the stairs of her own back porch and through her family’s kitchen, past the smiling saints calendar on the refrigerator door and the alphabet magnets that spell out ‘WELCOME HOME’.

She walks into the living room and sits on the couch, settles deeper into it by falling sideways to stare at her reflection in the black eye of the sleeping television set.

“Some doors can only be opened with blood,” Brasa tells her, imparting sacred knowledge or what he thinks passes as it.

The televisions screen blinks on, a horror movie, shades of red in motion, a maniac on a rampage, boring, she thinks until the moment the movie departs from hack and slash towards something with more substance, someone finger painting the alphabet of a language she doesn’t quite _know_ but that something else _remembers_.

“Well, where’s the door?” she asks no one.

Brasa chuckles from her father’s lazy boy recliner, pulling the lever to bring the foot rest up. “Rebirth is painful Kate, even the babysteps.”

She rolls her eyes, leaves him and the couch in favor the stomping up the stairs to slam her bedroom door, the mirror on the back of it banging. Her reflection looks tired, the room doesn’t look right behind her, too sparse and dim, not the room she languished in afterschool or spent Saturdays cleaning, not the room she had sleepovers in, not the room she’d masturbate with her face pressed to the pillow in. Her name’s written on the wall in red and she’s stepping forward to touch the reflection of its wet slashes, no mirror in front of her suddenly just another room.

She rocks forward, gasping, hand flying out to find something to help hold herself up with, in shock, she thinks, because she’s bleeding onto her own toes. Babysteps, she thinks wryly, mincing forward, sliding a shoulder to underscore her own name as she stumbles, pressing her back there, laughing at the ceiling she doesn’t recognize, woozy and wounded.

She’s glad for the absence of spirit guides to comment on the fact that rebirth and babysteps means naked and bleeding and bullet ridden again. Her vision turns to fuzz, television static, white noise. She hears her own heartbeat in her ears and wants to vomit.

She pads out and finds the breadcrumb trail of bodies in varying forms of disarray, haphazardly thrown aside, no neat slaughter but a half aware rampage. A jolt moves through her, something soothed, exit wounds sucking themselves closed, stitching themselves together again into neat, tidy, flesh.

Something else’s heart is beating to the cadence of her own and the shadow that leans from the doorway of the chapel into the hall spreads like something under the surface of calm water, like something she’s summoned.

She grimaces, cramping in the places where she’s healed around bullet fragments, the thought rises that it’s her that’s been summoned, her name written on the wall.

Richard Gecko doesn’t look good, wrung out wrong and missing his glasses. He’s not in a suit either and that’s what unsettles her the most, his becoming unhinged, because he can’t help her if he’s unhinged.

His mouth moves, shaping some syllable she can pretend is a question of her name.

* * *

“We need to fucking find them!” He yells, not understanding why he’s the only one ready or willing to do just that, held back by everyone else, door barred by a fresh body each time they think he might slip away to hot wire something he’s bought himself because they’ve taken all the sets of keys.

“We will,” the Ranger tells him, sure of it, only caring because the kid is involved. It’s a good thing he is because otherwise Seth knows it’d be him alone searching for his brother.

Tanner lingers on the edge of the room looking like he’s on the edge of saying something, opening his mouth, then shutting it to shuffle books around and look some approximation of scholarly in order to contribute to the group dynamic.

“Could you fucking stop?” Seth snaps.

“We have a bigger problem,” Tanner answers with enough force that it’s clear he’s been decided on saying it for a while and just needed a prompt to speak freely.

“What now?” Ximena asks on a sigh, on edge since her willful reassignment to tasks other than searching for her lost boss.

Tanner coughs with movie affect. “Your brother’s been playing both sides,” the professor says once he’s gotten the glare he must have been expecting.

“What the fuck you say?” Seth finds himself putting a hand under his jacket to ask.

Tanner, for what it’s worth, doesn’t look as cowed as he should, swallows and grinds down on some smart remark to say something more informative. “The things he’s been messing with are,” he starts, stopping to hum and turn his head, shaking it, raising a hand to tap fingertips to a book cover. “He’s been looking through all these books, there are notes, maps. I think he’s been following the directions for opening the gate. I don’t know if it’s really him doing it, though.”

Seth feels his anger cool. “Wait, hold on, you mean, like skullfucker?”

“No, I mean, something else. Something much worse. I think he’s um, listening to something. You know because he’s more susceptible, as history’s proven.”

“Hearing voices maybe? Yeah, great. Of course he’s hearing voices,” the Ranger says, cutting in, then scoffing.

Seth turns. “Hey! He’s not fucking crazy okay. And you,” he says pointing at Tanner. “He would have fucking said something, there’s gotta be something else, something we’re not seeing,” he explains, rubbing the back of his head furiously.

“He’s been coming and going without you. Hunting. He found the kid and then those things went after him. Big coincidence,” Burt throws forward, between tokes. “Hunters do that.”

Ximena snorts. “Hunting.”

“Yes, lover. _Hunting_. You know something about that, I’m sure,” Burt counters, blitzed yellow gaze flicking towards Freddie.

“Knock it off. This isn’t going to help save Scott, or Richie,” the Ranger cuts in, raising a hand like he’s suing for peace.

“Oh, so now you care about going after my brother. How about you stop blocking the door and give me my keys,” Seth challenges.

“I’m all for saving the day, just not walking into a trap to do it,” the man answers.

Burt puffs rings with great effort in their direction until they stop their back and forth and glance to him as he coughs weakly and points at his own chest as if to say: ‘Who me?’

“This is a bad fucking idea,” he tells them, “a stupendously bad idea in a basket case of bad ideas. You need to find your boss,” he tells Ximena, pointing at her cell phone. “And you need to start admitting that something might have its claws in your brother before you go charging out to drag him back here,” he tells Seth.

* * *

He’s unbearably hungry suddenly, the cold making him shake. He’s kept on ice, falling into unawareness.

“You think you see, but you’re blind to the true world. I will help you see.”

The branding fire of hands that leave marks on him sting him into the pain of brief awareness.

He wakes up to light being shined in his eyes and fluorescents above him.

“Where did you find him?”

“Out in the desert, looks like he did that to himself.”

“Any agitation?”

“Just babbling nonsense.”

The voices fade out in the stuporous fog that settles over him. Hunger comes, his body doesn’t heal, things are not going to be good, he tries futilely to communicate but something else takes hold of him, not the human drugs they pump into him but the conditions and constraints put upon him in a language he doesn’t understand.

He tries to warn them but they ignore him not able to sense the danger they’re in.

The hunger worsens over a span of unmeasurable days and nights, no clocks or windows, no change in what lights are kept on, there’s a sense of purgatory in the room he’s locked inside of. They restrain him but when his fangs drop from the depravation of sustenance it means nothing.

They goggle at him standing in the hall, a security guard comes to usher him away but gets too close, bleeds out down the front of his spotted hospital gown.

He gorges himself on fear and blood until no one is left and radio silence descends, something crawls around in the ventilation that he doesn’t have the desire to chase now that he’s full bellied.

The marks on him do not heal with the blooding.

He sits in the nondenominational chapel and waits for something to come and claim him.

He lays his hand palm up wondering if something wants to hold it, the eye at the center of the world blinks open, sedate, not all seeing, only opening to glance at events unfolding before it shuts again.

A sound breaks through the sensory disorder of too much blood in the air, a tandem heartbeat syncope he can feel the sharp stab of. The bench creaks as he rises from it, institutional garment saturated with red, he reaches reflexively for his glasses, to push them up his face but finds them absent.

Someone’s naked feet stick on the floor outside, the sucking sound of them pulling up from the wet floor is loud in the relative silence. It’s lucky, he thinks, that he’s no longer hungry.

He doubts the sanity of someone who can walk down shock corridor so steadily without faltering at the mess he’s made but he doesn’t know what he’s expecting for a nuthouse.

The soft pale outline is a blur, something naked, something bleeding. He blinks and it staggers against a linen cart, slips on the red floor and fumbles its way back up to its knees, continues towards him once it’s standing again.

She’s holding a hand against her belly, glaring halfheartedly at him as she swipes a gown from the untoppled and unspoiled, linen cart beside him.

Her hair is redder than he remembers, hanging over her half-hidden breasts, freckles hide in the blood splatter, a red curtain of blood swathing her from navel to sex and then down the inside of her thighs where she’s warmest.

“Tie this,” he hears from behind his left ear, not realizing he’s turned his face away.

He turns back to stare at the gaps that her hand holding the gown shut can’t hide, her shoulder pressed against the blue institutional wall.

“Uh, yeah,” and he hurries to be of service, moves her hair aside, rubs a finger down the nape of her neck as he bows the ties, knuckle brushing the back of her hips as he knots the other.

“Come on,” she says pushing off the wall, stepping away from it and from him.

She disappears around the edge of the hall into a room and he follows to find her staring at the patterns he’s left in the carnage.

“Kate?” he hedges, reaching out to turn her.

She pushes him bodily backwards and he falls more than seats himself in the waiting chair that’s a size too small for him.

“What are you doing?” he asks, barely concerned until he finds his arms trapped and then greatly concerned as she raises up the hem of her own hospital gown to widen her stance and settle over his lap, legs splattered red but drier than his own blood damp hem.

“Opening all the doors for me, all the ways for me to slip inside,” she says in a toneless voice. She takes a deep breath. “Thanks, nice of you.” The monotone sticks.

She presses closer, sliding in, knees pressing up onto his ribs, face so close he can tell her eyelashes apart and he’s starting to get hard.

“Hey, hey!” he protests, quietly, too soft but still jostling her in her seat on his lap, she bounces there, shifting her weight, resettling closer, the heat of her groin some place his snake brain could crawl inside.

She slips a hand up the bottom of his shredded straitjacket, pressing her small hand against his sternum, spanning the distance with an outstretched pinkie and pointer, thumb tracing up on the edge of his nipple and he might whine, does whine, trying to bite down on the sound.

“Better than those other assholes, anyway,” she mutters before she sighs, pressing her brow against his, as the hand on his hip moves to palm him with lazy confidence through the gown that might as well not exist between them. She slots herself closer, rocks against her wrist and rubs him harshly enough that the friction begins to hurt.

“What do you mean?” he breathes, flinching at the bite of her nails on his chest, something inside it rolling up against the heat of her hand. His breath hitches.

She lifts her weight a side at a time to pull up his gown, the warmth of her thighs humid and sticky, the red scent of her making him harder than the proximity.

“Hey Kate, you’re dead,” he tells her, looking up at her from under his brow, the something inside him squeezing his heart like a fist.

“Hey Richie, you’re crazy,” she answers, kissing the corner of his mouth.

“Go away,” he commands.

“You wrote my name on the wall, who did you think would show up?”

The question feels like a knife, but she’s gone and her name drips down the wall like his cock starts to leak, displayed obscenely between splayed legs and rucked up gown.

He jerks himself roughly, harsh and unforgiving, heels pressed to the floor, neck arching back, staring at her name smeared on the wall.

Something creaks overhead in the ventilation again, he rights himself, getting up to chase unfinished business, hungry again.


End file.
